Learn about the movement to protect public data.
Once you understand the state of play, you’ll see why your support is crucial.
Quick Ways to Learn:
What is happening to U.S. public data?
America’s public data infrastructure is under unprecedented strain.
Over the past year, federal agencies have altered, restricted, delayed, or removed large volumes of data, research, and summaries of data across nearly every domain of government: education, health, labor, housing, environment, immigration, civil rights, and more. Some changes are technical or administrative. Others are ideological. Together, they amount to a fundamental shift in the federal government’s role as a steward of public information.
In addition to the deleted, hidden, and altered data, America is losing her data experts: career federal employees dismissed, non-governmental research and academic centers un- and under-funded, and Federal Advisory Committees eliminated or otherwise rendered ineffective.
Cumulatively, the destruction and alteration of data, combined with the loss of dedicated curators, experts and institutional histories, produces widespread chaos as communities lose trusted data and trusted public servants who provide foundational data reporting.
Why Public Data Matters
Public data is the backbone of how we understand what is happening in the United States.
From school enrollment and graduation rates to housing insecurity, health outcomes, climate impacts, and civil rights enforcement, federal data shapes how communities are served, how resources are allocated, and how policymakers are held accountable. It is how we know who is being left behind—and whether public programs are working.
Children, families, and historically marginalized communities are often hit hardest—because the programs that serve them depend most on federal data to demonstrate need and justify funding.
At the same time, in most situations, replacing federal data is not realistic. The federal government invests billions of dollars each year to collect nationally consistent, high-quality statistics. When those systems erode, no combination of nonprofits, universities, or foundations can fully fill the gap.
When data disappears or becomes unreliable:
- Communities lose visibility into their own conditions
- States and local governments struggle to plan and allocate funds
- Journalists and watchdogs cannot hold agencies accountable
- Researchers lose the ability to measure what works
- Innovators are hampered in creating the generation of solutions
- The public becomes uncertain about what information they can rely on to make decisions
- Philanthropy loses the ability to target and evaluate its investments
A rapidly emerging data protection movement.
In response to its many challenges, a diverse and fast-moving ecosystem has formed to protect the public data infrastructure.
This is not one organization or one campaign. It is a network of efforts spanning multiple sectors, skills, and communities:
Monitoring and Accountability Projects
Some groups focus on tracking what is changing inside federal agencies:
Which datasets are altered, delayed, restricted, or removed—and what those changes mean in practice. This includes both automated tools and human review, because understanding the impact of a data change often requires deep subject-matter knowledge.
Issue-Area Advocates
Organizations working on issues such as education, housing, health, civil rights, disability, LGBTQ+ equity, reproductive justice, poverty, and immigration rely heavily on federal data. Many have mobilized to defend the datasets their communities depend on—and to tell real-world stories about what happens when that data disappears.
Legal and Policy Experts
Some efforts explore litigation, regulatory advocacy, and oversight strategies to prevent unlawful data suppression and to reinforce agencies’ legal obligations to collect and publish information while protecting sensitive and personally identifiable information.
These efforts are essential and impressive, but they are also fragmented. Most operate in their own issue silos, often under severe funding constraints. Without coordination, duplication increases, gaps remain, and opportunities for shared strategy are lost.
This is where philanthropy enters the picture.
Why Philanthropy has a unique role.
Foundations and their grantees depend on public data as much as anyone.
Funders, researchers, foundations, grantees – the comprehensive philanthropic ecosystem – rely on federal datasets to measure poverty, housing stability, educational outcomes, health disparities, and economic opportunity across the country. Loss of these datasets leaves a gap in assessing mission progress and need. When federal data streams weaken, philanthropic strategy and success weaken with them.
But philanthropy also has something else: the ability to convene, connect, and stabilize a field that is moving faster than any single organization can manage. The challenge is not that there is too little activity. The challenge is that there is too little coordination, shared infrastructure, and sustained investment.
Meeting This Moment
Funders for the Future of Public Data (3FPD) was created to meet this moment.
3FPD is a national philanthropic collaborative that brings foundations together to protect the integrity, accessibility, and usefulness of federal public data now and into the future. The 3FPD Steering Committee, comprising organizations committed to protecting public data, has created structure and governance for philanthropic action and oversight, and has confirmed strategic priorities for immediate remediation and long-term sustainability for the future of protected and trustworthy public data.
Immediate actions include: preserving access and defending data protection; monitoring changes; and communicating with communities, researchers, policymakers, and everyone who relies on public data to live, work, invest, govern, build, and thrive.
Long-term strategic priorities include a vision and implementation plan for improving public data–its scope, quality, access, and protection–far into the future.